[00:02:15] Patrick Donley: We had talked earlier before we just started recording. It’s been a while, a couple of years ago, I think, but a lot has changed since then. And I’m eager to dive into your story. I haven’t heard of it. I do follow you on Twitter and I love your content. I want to touch on the book that you’ve written and just learn a lot here today.

[00:02:32] Patrick Donley: So what I wanted to start off talking about is just about early days, that kind of coming out of college and like any money mistakes, how you learned about financial literacy, just dumb things you may have done, like when you were in your younger years. 

[00:02:45] Steve Adcock: Let’s see, coming out of college, I remember the second or third day out of college, I was living like a college student because I was.

[00:02:53] Steve Adcock: No money, basically spent on nothing, just meddled my way through just anybody else would probably do in college. Now it’s my opportunity to be a quote unquote professional, working with highly qualified smart people. Making lots of money. That was the anticipation that I had going into the workforce.

[00:03:11] Steve Adcock: And I remember the second or third day walking into the office, I took an opportunity and I looked around my office building and there was a bunch of it, it was a big cube farm. 

[00:03:19] Patrick Donley: What were you doing? What was your first job? 

[00:03:21] Steve Adcock: It was information technology. So we were all computer programmers. And everybody was in their cube.

[00:03:26] Steve Adcock: They were meddling away, just typing. And I thought to myself, this is it. This is what I’m going to be doing for the next 40 years. There’s absolutely no freaking way I can possibly do this. This is not going to work for me. Now, at that time I was like 24, 23, 24. So I had no idea. about financial independence, about early retirement, about investing strategies and how to save.

[00:03:50] Steve Adcock: I had none of that anywhere near worked out. 

[00:03:54] Patrick Donley: And that wasn’t discussed like growing up, like when you were a kid growing up, did your parents teach you about saving, investing? 

[00:04:01] Steve Adcock: They did. They did. But as a kid, I didn’t, it didn’t really make much difference to me. My mind was in a whole different space. Not really a thing that I was all that worried about.

[00:04:10] Steve Adcock: So yes, I had a lot of, there was a potential for me to hit the ground running, but I didn’t do that because I just wanted to, I don’t know. I really don’t know what I wanted at the time. And I think a lot of young people probably fall into that same boat. They just want to make money and have some fun and go on about their lives.

[00:04:27] Steve Adcock: But for me, that just wasn’t going to work in that kind of environment. Slowly over the years, I started to put the pieces into place slowly. And I do emphasize that, but man, the mistakes that I would make, I basically saved around 4 percent of my salary. And that was the company match in my 401k. So at least I did that.

[00:04:48] Steve Adcock: That was good. That was smart. I got the company match. I got that free money, which everybody should do. If your company provides that as one of their benefits to you, that’s literally free money into your long term retirement account. So I did that, but everything else was basically play money. I can do whatever I want with it.

[00:05:08] Steve Adcock: Yes, I budgeted. I had the rent. I had the gas. I had the food. I had all these categories. And I try to be good with where I was spending and control my expenses, but that’s just, it just didn’t work out that way at all. I would steal from pots that had too much money so I could spend it on things that I just wanted to spend money on.

[00:05:28] Steve Adcock: I was a big spender. 

[00:05:30] Patrick Donley: Did you get into credit card debt? Was that like high interest credit card debt? 

[00:05:34] Steve Adcock: That’s one thing. Yeah, that’s one thing I never got into. That was the thing that my parents thankfully drilled into my head. Credit card debt was not an option. Period. And to this day, I have not paid a single dime in credit card interest.

[00:05:52] Steve Adcock: And that definitely helped me. 

[00:05:55] Patrick Donley: I wanted to hear about your book, Millionaire Habits. What, when did it come out? 

[00:06:00] Steve Adcock: Like actually it came out in January of this year, Millionaire Habits. 

[00:06:04] Patrick Donley: It was recent. I want to hear about the book. I want to hear about what the impetus for writing it was. Do you consider yourself a writer and.

[00:06:11] Patrick Donley: Just like what it was like writing it. I’ve always wanted to write a book, but never have. 

[00:06:16] Steve Adcock: Strange thing is, I never really wanted to write one. I never considered myself an author. I never really wanted to be an author. But Wiley reached out to me, my publisher for this book, and they just made it worth my while, so I did.

[00:06:28] Steve Adcock: And it was the, I’ve heard two different extremes with writing a book from other authors. It’s either the best thing they’ve ever done. They would do it again, 10 times over, or it was one of the most grueling processes they’ve ever gone through. The editing is hell. It takes forever. ever. And it was just awful.

[00:06:45] Steve Adcock: So for me, it was more toward the first part. It was actually way more enjoyable than I thought it was going to be a very informal writing process. I opened up Google Docs and just started writing. It was really that easy. The publisher didn’t really help me outline the book or pick out topics that I should hit on nothing.

[00:07:03] Steve Adcock: They just said, it’s yours, write it, write whatever you want. And so I did. And it was More or less my entire process of everything that I’ve learned, both me going through the process of becoming a millionaire and achieving financial independence and what I’ve seen other millionaires do in their lives and the habits that we all share, the things that we all do day in and day out to not only become millionaires, but more importantly, stay millionaires.

[00:07:34] Steve Adcock: So these habits I combined all into 10 chapters, each going through each habit of millionaires. Then I also devote another section to the FIRE movement, the Financial Independence Retire Early movement, which won’t be for everybody, but I think Once you get to this point where you’re fairly comfortable financially, you might be surprised at how close to financial independence you are.

[00:07:58] Steve Adcock: But until you know what to look for, until you know the Trinity 4 percent rule, for instance, to calculate your net worth, those things are necessary. 

[00:08:09] Patrick Donley: Let’s rule 4 percent a little bit. Can you explain the 4 percent rule? You mentioned it in the Trinity study. Go into that a little bit more because it’s a really interesting part of financial independence.

[00:08:20] Steve Adcock: I think there were four professors at Trinity University and The goal for this study was to determine how much money you need to have to stand a reasonably good chance of never running out of money for the rest of your life after you quit your job. And so they took data from, even including the Great Depression, through I think it was the eighties now.

[00:08:46] Steve Adcock: So it’s not exactly a new study. And that’s one of the major complaints about the Trinity study is it’s old data, but they took such a wide variety of numbers with this study through decades and decades of market performance. that I think it still provides a good baseline today. And what they found was you can spend about 4 percent of your net worth every single year and stand a reasonably good chance of never running out of money.

[00:09:16] Steve Adcock: So to make these calculations easy, if you have a million dollars of net worth, You could spend about 40 grand a year. For some of you, that’s going to be way low. For some, it might be okay. This seems pretty reasonable. The other way that you can do that calculation is the amount of money that you do spend in a year.

[00:09:33] Steve Adcock: Multiply that by 25. That’s going to be the amount of money that you should have as a part of your net worth. All of your investments, your savings, that kind of thing. That’s what you should have before calling it quits. I found that we can overshoot the 4 percent rule. We’ve been, when we first retired and I use that term loosely because I’m doing a lot of things now, but after I quit my job in 2016, we were spending probably three and a half to 4%.

[00:09:58] Steve Adcock: So right after we quit, we were spending low because we wanted to make sure that this was going to work. And then once we got a pretty good feeling that, okay, we’re going to be fine here, then we started to tick up the spending, tick up the spending, tick up the spending, and now we’re probably spending seven to 8 percent of our net worth, but we’re also earning income.

[00:10:18] Steve Adcock: So it gets a little bit more complicated with our situation. We’re not putting the Trinity study, but for most people, it’s still going to be a good baseline. 

[00:10:27] Patrick Donley: During your process of working towards financial independence, were you working with a financial planner or was this just you running things on your own, making your own decisions?

[00:10:35] Patrick Donley: Or were you getting outside advice? 

[00:10:38] Steve Adcock: 99 percent of it just came from me. I never hired a financial planner. My dad gave me some advice here and there. He’s a, he was a very smart guy or he is a very smart guy. Very good investor. So I was getting some advice from him, but the majority of it was just me, just my wife and I, once we got married in 2014, just figuring it out, figuring out what we had to do to make it work.

[00:11:00] Steve Adcock: I’m a very hands off investor. And I think for the majority of the people out there, you probably should be a passive investor. Passive investors make more money on average than active investors. Period. It’s that simple. And whenever I say that, everybody out there, all the active investors think that they’re the exception to that.

[00:11:21] Steve Adcock: Oh, I make more. I make more. It’s not true. It’s just not true over time. There are certain points like a couple months, a half year, a year, maybe even two years where you could make more. But if you look over the long term, 20, 30, 40 years, passive index funds, passive ETFs. They are going to be your money makers and you don’t have to think about them.

[00:11:45] Steve Adcock: You just invest and let them do what they do best, which is build. 

[00:11:50] Patrick Donley: That’s good advice. I want to hear you’re sitting at this cubicle doing work. When does the light bulb moment or what was the influence where you were like, I need to get out of here and I need to start quickly and start saving.

[00:12:03] Patrick Donley: And here’s the path, how to do it. 

[00:12:05] Steve Adcock: Yeah, it was, it came many years later. So I always knew that I couldn’t do this for the rest of my life. I just had no plan. But there was once, I think in 2010 ish, when I was around 30, I’d say, I walked out into my garage and I reached up to open up the garage door as I normally would just mindlessly, but something stopped me.

[00:12:26] Steve Adcock: I didn’t open up the garage. Instead, I turned around and I looked at what was in my garage. So I had a house in the suburbs. I had a nice garage. Two stall garages, on the left, were my brand new Cadillac CTS. On the right was my supercharged Corvette convertible. And in the middle was my Yamaha R1 sport bike.

[00:12:45] Steve Adcock: So I had the toys. I had the cars. I liked going fast. I liked almost killing myself, I’m surprised I’m still alive today to be perfectly frank with you. But I think that was the very first inkling that something is wrong here. I’m still not satisfied. I have all of these things. I have a house. I have a car.

[00:13:02] Steve Adcock: I have the motorcycles. But yet I’m still not satisfied. I still don’t see myself spending a life doing this. Just earning and spending and earning and spending and earning and spending. That hamster wheel that I was on, I thought was going to make me happy. And yeah, there were fun times. There’s no question about that, but there comes a point in your life.

[00:13:21] Steve Adcock: And I guess for me, it may have come a little bit earlier in my early thirties. Where do I see myself doing this for the next 10 years or 15 years or 20 years? And the answer was no. Hell no, there’s no way I’m doing this for the next couple of decades. So I think that was the moment where I said to myself, something has to change and it has to change now.

[00:13:43] Steve Adcock: I don’t necessarily know what it is yet, but a couple months later, I stumbled on My early retirement mentor. And I think we’ve all heard of this guy, Mr. Money Mustache. He was a software developer. I was a software developer. His situation and my situation were very similar. So he started reading his blog, figuring out what he was doing.

[00:14:06] Steve Adcock: And this snowball started to build from there. And over the years, my net worth continued to grow. My savings continued to grow. My spending got less and less. My net worth ballooned. And here I sit. 

[00:14:19] Patrick Donley: So you’re on this hedonic treadmill, basically. You’ve got all the trappings of success, the cars, the motorcycle, the house, but there’s still obviously something missing.

[00:14:28] Patrick Donley: It’s almost like at 30, you have this little midlife crisis. You didn’t go out and buy more stuff, it doesn’t sound like. But it’s like a little bit of a crisis. It’s like this script that I’ve been following doesn’t work. Then it’s now what? 

[00:14:40] Steve Adcock: Yeah, exactly. It was, I guess I, I bought this stuff before the crisis and it really got easier once I married my wife, who is a rocket scientist, like an actual rocket scientist.

[00:14:51] Steve Adcock: So now we have two incomes. And when you have that, we were drunk. Dual income, no kids. And we still don’t have kids. So that’s a big advantage for us in our situation, because kids just are expensive. I think it’s a quarter million dollars on average to raise a kid until 18, something like that. So now we have two incomes, no kids, we have a couple of dogs, but let’s face it, they’re cheap.

[00:15:14] Steve Adcock: And by the end of our careers, we were making a little over 200 grand, 220 grand, I think, by the end of our careers, and this was back in 2000, 13 or so. So that was good money. That was good money now, but that was especially good money then. So we had a decision to make, my wife and I, we had a decision to make.

[00:15:32] Steve Adcock: We could either live like rock stars, buy a vacation home, go out to nice dinners, just basically live the lavish lifestyle because we were rich, quote unquote rich. Or we can save and invest the vast majority of our income and quit our full time jobs and do what we actually want to be doing for the rest of our lives.

[00:15:52] Steve Adcock: Long story short, we chose that second option. We saved, we invested, we saved my entire 100 percent of my paycheck. And we lived off of half of my wife’s. So I, in a low cost of living area that adds up so quickly. 

[00:16:08] Patrick Donley: Yeah, that’s huge. So you were into Mr. Money. Mustache was your wife. Who’s a rocket scientist?

[00:16:14] Patrick Donley: Did these principles make sense? I’m on board. I’m into this also, or what was that like? 

[00:16:20] Steve Adcock: Believe it or not, no, and she never wanted to retire early. She never wanted to quit her job. In fact, she liked her job. So if it wasn’t for me, she’d probably still be working right now in her rocket scientist job.

[00:16:32] Steve Adcock: I was the one who hated what I did. I appreciated the income it provided and everything in my life. Now that job gave me, I certainly appreciate that. But at the time. Getting up in the morning and commuting to an office and going through all that process of working a full time job. I did not like that.

[00:16:50] Steve Adcock: So for her, it was, if you’re going to give me a better option, sure, let’s do it. Otherwise I want to continue working the job that I actually like. And for us, it was that option, that better option was selling basically everything we owned, moving into an Airstream RV and traveling the country full time.

[00:17:10] Steve Adcock: And that is ultimately what we did. All of our possessions fit into this 200 square foot RV in 2016 when we first began to travel full time. That was it. That’s all we had. And it was, it’s not going to be for everybody, but it was definitely an eye opening experience for us. 

[00:17:31] Patrick Donley: It’s a pretty radical change and you don’t come to a decision like that lightly to sell everything by an airstream.

[00:17:36] Patrick Donley: I think a lot of people have that dream, that definitely is there, but to actually do it is a whole nother thing. So was it convincing to her? This is the new life we’re going to pursue. And I’m curious about that because to actually pull the trigger, difficult to do. 

[00:17:51] Steve Adcock: I was the impetus for sure, but it wasn’t me saying, this is what we’re going to do.

[00:17:56] Steve Adcock: It was what if we did this and every single day for years back when we lived in a traditional house in a neighborhood after dinner, every single day, we would walk our dogs and we would talk about this. We would talk about our future, what we wanted our future to be. to look like. And we worked backwards from there.

[00:18:13] Steve Adcock: And that’s how we got onto the same page about what we wanted to do, how we were going to do it, how much money we think it’s going to cost. Those things were critical components to figure out before we quit our jobs, those high income jobs, and pursue this lifestyle. So together, we really reached that same point.

[00:18:33] Steve Adcock: We both like to travel. We still do that to this day, not in an Airstream. We travel more traditionally by renting Airbnbs and VRBOs around the world and things like that. But that was one thing that we always just like to do. We all like to travel and see new things. And so instead of renting an apartment or something or renting houses everywhere we went, it was much more economical, like way more.

[00:18:55] Steve Adcock: Economical. So just sell everything we have, buy an RV, and that’s our house. Then everywhere we go, we have our house. We have our bed. We have our possessions. We had two dogs at the time that they came with us, of course. So taking your house with you was ultimately, I think, what appealed to my wife as we were discussing what was going to happen and what we wanted to see our futures look like.

[00:19:19] Patrick Donley: I want to get into the Airstream life. I, there, I’ve got several friends, back in our 20s or 30s, that would talk about this, like just exactly what you did. I’m envious in some ways. So I want to hear a little bit about the story of like just some, what it was like living in an Airstream for how long?

[00:19:35] Steve Adcock: It was three straight years, three years we lived in Airstream. It’s not going to be for everybody. In fact, I have friends of ours who are doing the same thing, not in an Airstream, in a different RV. And it’s really not for them. You live really close with your spouse. It’s a good test for a relationship, right?

[00:19:52] Steve Adcock: That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. We always say that 10 years of normal relationship living with your spouse is worth about 30 years. When you’re living in an Airstream or an RV, 200 square feet, you can’t come to the dinner table at the end of the day and ask your spouse. So how was your day?

[00:20:09] Steve Adcock: Cause you know what their day was like. Cause you were sitting right next to them or close to it. So you have to like your spouse. Luckily, my spouse and I like each other. So it wasn’t really a big deal. And again, We didn’t have kids. I do know people with kids who travel full time. A lot of people with kids who travel full time.

[00:20:28] Steve Adcock: So it can be done. Don’t let that be an excuse. Don’t use your kids as an excuse. I say that until I’m blue in the face on Twitter and social media. Never use your kids as an excuse. There’s always going to be a way to figure it out if you want it bad enough, but you live small. We had very little storage.

[00:20:48] Steve Adcock: Things break. Even an Airstream, like the more expensive, built Airstreams, things break in those two things break all the time. It’s only a matter of time till you get stuck on the side of the road with a blown tire, which happened at 70 miles an hour. We blew out the left rear tire in our truck.

[00:21:05] Steve Adcock: You just have to be okay with that. Those, the things that go wrong. And those are the things that you don’t really hear about when you think about full time RVing. You think about the amazing places you’re going to go and the things that you’re going to experience and all these things are true. That does happen, but there’s also that other side where we have to pack up everything because we’re going to move and we’ve got to secure everything.

[00:21:26] Steve Adcock: We’ve got to hitch up. We got to drive and everybody’s passing you on the left and everybody hates you because you’re holding up traffic. Those are the things that you just don’t. hear about until you actually get into that situation and you’re going through that as a full time RVer. So I think it’s great for a lot of people.

[00:21:42] Steve Adcock: It was great for us for three years, but even for us, we didn’t have to stop. There was nothing that made us stop other than the fact of us just being over it and said, okay, We want to spread out a little bit, have our own property. We have seven acres now. We don’t want to have to make reservations everywhere we go.

[00:21:59] Steve Adcock: So three years was enough for us. 

[00:22:03] Patrick Donley: So were you getting into, because of your Mr. Money mustache influence, were you guys getting into minimalism prior to selling everything? So it was an easier move to have these kinds of reduced living quarters? 

[00:22:15] Steve Adcock: Yeah, garage sales are nobody’s business.

[00:22:18] Steve Adcock: Like by the end, we were just saying, take it like free. Everybody’s free. Take it. Just please do not leave anything. We just wanted to get rid of as much stuff as we possibly could, especially as we were getting close to making that transition. Yeah. But we did a lot of things to cut back expenses like the cable TV.

[00:22:34] Steve Adcock: That’s easy stuff. Basically never going out to eat, always cooking our own meals, tracking our expenses meticulously. There was a time where my wife could tell you how much we spent on sweet potatoes. Over the years, like each and everything we bought, you definitely don’t have to go to that extreme.

[00:22:49] Steve Adcock: Don’t think you have to do that. Do not think that, but my wife’s a rocket scientist. She loves spreadsheets. She loves numbers. So guess what? That’s what made her feel comfortable. So I said, go for it, man. It’s all good. The more data, the better. You don’t have to have that much, but anyway, tracking your expenses was absolutely critical for us.

[00:23:06] Patrick Donley: So we knew which areas. What’d you use to do that for the budgeting and tracking expenses? Do you have something you’d recommend or just a simple spreadsheet? 

[00:23:16] Steve Adcock: We always use personal capital at a high level, like net worth kind of thing, but we just use a spreadsheet. There are applications that make it easy, like a lot of them now, but back then, especially there was Mint back then.

[00:23:29] Steve Adcock: I’m sure that there were others, personal capital, but that’s not really a budgeting application. But yeah, it was basically all Google Sheets. That’s it. 

[00:23:39] Patrick Donley: Back to the Airstream. They’re such iconic vehicles, I see them on the highway and I’m like, I wonder where they’re headed someplace cool.

[00:23:48] Patrick Donley: So did you guys just stay in the U. S. and visit all the national parks and all that? What was your travel itinerary? 

[00:23:56] Steve Adcock: Yep. We stayed a hundred percent in the U. S. with the Airstream. Everywhere from the Columbia River Gorge, Washington State, Oregon border down to Arizona, of course, where we are.

[00:24:07] Steve Adcock: Over to Alabama, then up to the Finger Lakes, Michigan. We didn’t hit every single national park. That wasn’t really one of our goals. If there was one nearby, we would obviously go to it, but we just wanted to try new places, try new things, see the sites, see what’s there. Didn’t really have a big itinerary necessarily.

[00:24:24] Steve Adcock: I wanted to be around the internet. That was the major sticking point with a lot of these campgrounds and boondocking sites. What does that mean, boondocking? We boondocked a lot, which means it’s free. It’s government owned property BLM land is government owned property, that you could stay on usually for about 14 days, usually.

[00:24:46] Steve Adcock: And then you have to go. If nobody checks up on you, maybe you could stay longer. We never really pushed our luck after 14 days. We were ready to move on anyway, so we moved on. We definitely liked the West Coast more than the East Coast. There was no comparison. The West Coast had way fewer people.

[00:25:04] Steve Adcock: It’s way more beautiful, at least in our opinion. There are way more places to boondock because there are fewer people. There’s more open land. So we spent the majority of our time. in the western half of the U. S., like Colorado West. We did take one year and travel the east, like Alabama, Virginia, Tennessee, New York, and then back over through the upper peninsula.

[00:25:27] Steve Adcock: Lake Superior was amazing. I would love to, to live on Lake Superior or not live, but have a house there. Yeah. The West was our jam. Absolutely beautiful country out here. 

[00:25:39] Patrick Donley: Where were you guys living prior to taking off in the Airstream? 

[00:25:43] Steve Adcock: In Tucson. That was a low cost of living area, so it worked well for us.

[00:25:49] Patrick Donley: So you’re three years in the Airstream. At some point, you’re like, okay, you’re ready for the next chapter. Tell me about that. Tell me about what happened next. You decide to buy some land outside of Tucson? 

[00:26:00] Steve Adcock: Yeah, originally I wanted a bigger office because I was doing a lot online, a lot of writing. So I wanted a more, I don’t know, conducive office.

[00:26:07] Steve Adcock: I was tired of sharing my office with the kitchen and that’s what I was doing in the Airstream. So at first we were like what if we just changed RVs? We went with a toy hauler, which means the back folds down. You can drive up an ATV or something back there and haul toys with you. That’s why they call them toy haulers.

[00:26:24] Steve Adcock: But I can convert it. That backspace into my own office. So we looked around at these options and there were some good ones, but most RVs just aren’t really well made for full time living, even the expensive ones, a hundred, 120, 150 grand. For some of these, you could push on the walls and the walls bend.

[00:26:42] Steve Adcock: It’s what the hell are we paying for here? So then we said, okay this probably isn’t going to work because the walls in our Airstream don’t bend, but we had a friend of ours. Who lived here in Southern Arizona. We went to visit him in our Airstream. We brought the Airstream all the way down and we got a feel for what it’s like here and the land values, the price of land, how much space you get.

[00:27:02] Steve Adcock: And it might be a good option for us. Let’s get some land. Let’s park the Airstream here and let’s build out from there. Then it morphed into that still doesn’t solve my office problem. What if we find a small house or we build a small house on our property so we can build it exactly the way we want it?

[00:27:19] Steve Adcock: We want it. Travel some of the year, don’t travel some of the year. So maybe six months here, six months travel. We ended up buying the place here in Southern Arizona and we really don’t want to travel anymore. We like it here. We like being stationary and having our own things and having room to spread out.

[00:27:33] Steve Adcock: So last year we ended up selling the Airstream, so we no longer have an RV at all. And this is our full time job. This is an off grid place and our Airstream had solar. So that kind of got our juices flowing in terms of keeping our expenses down, but yet still having that stationary place. So 100 percent off grid, well on site septic system.

[00:27:52] Steve Adcock: It is a complete recession proof house and property we have here in southern Arizona, which is great when you bought the property. 

[00:28:01] Patrick Donley: Was the house already there or did you guys, was it something that you guys built? 

[00:28:06] Steve Adcock: The house was here. We have since converted the garage into part of our indoor living space. In fact, where I’m talking to you right now was originally the garage.

[00:28:15] Steve Adcock: It wasn’t finished, just concrete on the floor, cinder block walls, but we converted that. So it went from a 640 square foot house. So still pretty small for housing standards to about 900 square feet or so of living space. So still small. Almost four times the size of our, a little more than four times the size, math is hard, of our Airstream and it works just perfectly for us.

[00:28:42] Patrick Donley: Luckily, you’ve got a rocket scientist to help you with the math, right? 

[00:28:45] Steve Adcock: She does the math and I just nod my head. It’s yeah, that sounds right. 

[00:28:49] Patrick Donley: So now you got your working space, it sounds like you got a nice setup and you’re totally self sufficient. Sounds pretty close to self sufficient.

[00:28:58] Steve Adcock: Yeah, the only thing we buy is propane. We have, we, we have a fireplace, a propane fireplace as our heat source. That’s it. We have no heat, no air conditioning either, which might surprise some of you knowing we live in Arizona, but you might be surprised at how well EVAP coolers work in the summertime because it’s so dry here.

[00:29:13] Steve Adcock: But we are thinking about installing a mini split to Provide more of a, more of an AC option in the summertime to cool us off. But yeah, other than that, other than the propane we buy, we are 100 percent self-sufficient. We need nothing but the sun to sustain us here. 

[00:29:29] Patrick Donley: That’s awesome. I want to hear a little bit about your number actually, like prior to selling everything and buying the Airstream.

[00:29:36] Patrick Donley: What was the number where you were like, once we hit this, boom, we’re out and we can go do these adventures? 

[00:29:43] Steve Adcock: When I quit my job in 2016, we had about, we had a little over 800, 000 in net worth. My wife continued to work for a year because she felt guilty about leaving. When she quit, I didn’t have a job then.

[00:29:58] Steve Adcock: We officially set sail then. We had 870, 000 in net worth. That’s it. 870, 000. That was our number. I don’t know if we had said we needed 870, 000, but at that point we just felt comfortable that we could do this. I think the key though, in making this a reality for us, is we bought the Airstream and moved into the Airstream a year before I quit.

[00:30:25] Steve Adcock: So we did a shakedown kind of year. We were stationary most of the time, but we were like, maybe we should try this. See if we’re going to get on each other’s nerves or hate each other’s guts by the end of the second week. And if we did, we would go back to our standard lives. But that first year of living small really helped us to be comfortable with making this move sooner rather than later.

[00:30:50] Steve Adcock: I think my wife wanted about a million bucks before we set sail. I certainly didn’t need that much, but I think that first year of living small, living in the Airstream, really convinced both of us that we could probably do this. at less than 900k and just live very frugally for a while. Make sure this is going to work.

[00:31:10] Steve Adcock: Make sure we’re enjoying the whole trip and spending only 35 to 40k a year. And luckily for us, it worked out just fine. 

[00:31:19] Patrick Donley: You got married later in life, but I wanted to hear a little bit about your thoughts on the advantages of that. I did the same. So I wanted to hear your thoughts on that. 

[00:31:27] Steve Adcock: Yeah. The person you marry is going to be one of the most consequential decisions that you will ever make.

[00:31:34] Steve Adcock: And that’s definitely not something that you should rush. I didn’t want to, I could have gotten married in my twenties, but it just did not feel right. My parents, however. We’re high school sweethearts. They got married super young. So sometimes it works. Sometimes you just find the right person in your teens.

[00:31:53] Steve Adcock: You stay together, you get married, and that’s great. But for me, and sounds like for you as well, I was in my late 20s. Actually, no, I was in my early 30s when I got married. Yeah, early 30s. And it was one thing that I was okay with waiting because I knew that finding the right person who could actually deal with this every single day was going to be crucially important.

[00:32:15] Steve Adcock: And it’s absolutely worth the wait. 

[00:32:18] Patrick Donley: Yeah. And it can be crippling going through a divorce and it just really is a horrible thing to go through financially, emotionally, all the way around. It’s. Pretty rough. So I totally agree. You want to make sure you nail that decision? 

[00:32:32] Steve Adcock: Absolutely. And nobody thinks they’re marrying the wrong person.

[00:32:36] Steve Adcock: Nobody gets married knowing that they’re going to get divorced. So everybody thinks, Oh yeah, I found the right person now. Everybody thinks that, and it’s very natural. And. But I think still for most people, there’s that little nugget in the back of your head. Is this just a good enough relationship for me?

[00:32:52] Steve Adcock: Or is this one that I am completely all in? Let’s do this. There’s not a chance in the world. This is not going to work. I can’t imagine living another day away from this person. Those two things are different. And Very few people are going to admit to that, but I think a lot of marriages are just a, Oh, I found someone.

[00:33:12] Steve Adcock: He or she is cute, handsome, strong, whatever. This can work. We can make this work. And I think that is why one of the reasons why the divorce rate is so unbelievably high today. I think it might be over 50 percent now, which is really devastating. It’ll completely destroy your wealth. Getting divorced, unfortunately.

[00:33:33] Patrick Donley: Yes. My wife is a therapist and similar to living in an airstream going through COVID. She said with couples together, it was like people knew real quick being together during COVID, whether it was going to last or not. And she saw a lot of people that didn’t work out being together so closely day after day.

[00:33:50] Patrick Donley: I wanted to hear about your COVID experience. Like you took a bit of a hit. with your portfolio. I wanted to hear how you dealt with it. I have a brother who, when COVID hit, he thought it was the end of the world, liquidated everything, never got back in, bad decision. So I wanted to hear how you handled that situation psychologically.

[00:34:09] Steve Adcock: In the middle of COVID, we were down about 200, 000 in our, as part of our net worth. I didn’t panic. I didn’t sell. We didn’t do anything different. We may have cut back a little bit on our spending going out to whatever, but we certainly didn’t sell investments. We didn’t get all out of the market.

[00:34:27] Steve Adcock: We have a long term horizon here and COVID was something that wasn’t like the Great Depression. This was this. It was incredibly devastating for a lot of people. There’s no question about that, but it’s a temporary blip. Most bear markets and that was a hell of a bear market, but most bear markets only last about a year.

[00:34:46] Steve Adcock: on average. So if you can just manage to not lose your, you know what, for a year, you’re probably going to be fine. And that’s exactly what happened with us. We didn’t sell a single share of stock because it was down. In fact, that’s the worst time to sell when you’re down. You buy when the market’s down, you sell when the market’s high.

[00:35:10] Steve Adcock: So we certainly did not make that mistake. And we are, as of last week, I think we were up about 400, 000 since our 200k collapse in during the height of COVID until today. So it almost never pays to time the market, to think that everything is going to hell in a handbasket. I better sell now. Almost never works out.

[00:35:34] Steve Adcock: If you have that long term time horizon, you’re going to be just fine. You’re going to have way less stress. And it certainly turned out that way for us. 

[00:35:42] Patrick Donley: Did you go through the 2008 great financial crisis? Was that something that you had gone through? You’d already seen a downturn. You’ve already seen, this pattern 

[00:35:49] Patrick Donley: repeat.

[00:35:50] Patrick Donley: Did that help at all? 

[00:35:52] Steve Adcock: Actually, no, I did go through it, but that was, I think, three years after my first job, getting my first job. So that was, I was in the acquisition phase. Phase at that point. So I had a 401k Roth IRA. I don’t think I had a brokerage account at that point. So maybe those two were my primary investments, but yeah, I just continue to funnel money in.

[00:36:12] Steve Adcock: I didn’t really care. I wasn’t an expert with all this. And I think that may have helped me to stay in because I didn’t think I was an expert. I didn’t think that I knew what was going to happen. I think a lot of smart people out there, smart investors think that they know, they convince themselves that this is going to happen, and then this is going to happen, and then this is going to happen, so I have to do this.

[00:36:35] Steve Adcock: But there is none of that with me. I said, I admitted to myself, I have no idea what’s going to happen. So frankly, I don’t care. I have a job making good money. I’m just going to keep the ship sailing in the very same direction. And it worked out so well for me that I did not panic sell during either the 2008 recession or the 2020, 2019, 2020 COVID content.

[00:37:01] Patrick Donley: Yeah, no, it just shows the importance of just having a long term time perspective. As you’re striving for financial independence, one of the arguments or people that say one of the challenges, 

[00:37:10] Patrick Donley: What do you do about health insurance? That’s a common thing that I hear people say once you leave your W 2, you no longer have health insurance.

[00:37:16] Patrick Donley: How did you handle that? 

[00:37:18] Steve Adcock: At first we did a health share. We did Liberty health share. We no longer have Liberty, but for the first couple of years when we were living in the Airstream, we were traveling around and we needed the flexibility of going to any hospital at any time. We didn’t want to deal with it, out of network dock.

[00:37:33] Steve Adcock: That wasn’t going to work for us. And the cost was exceptionally high for a service that we probably wouldn’t be able to use anyway. So it was stupid. For us to look at traditional health care when our lifestyle was going to have us all over the country. So the Liberty HealthShare plan worked fine for us.

[00:37:49] Steve Adcock: We never actually used it. We never submitted bills. It worked because we never used it. We still paid into it, of course. But since then, especially since the Affordable Care Act came into play, health insurance is still expensive, but it’s not exactly this huge thing anymore. We just went on the marketplace, found a high deductible plan that worked for us.

[00:38:07] Steve Adcock: Has an HSA. And we bought it. It’s no big deal. So I think that it used to be a bigger problem than it is now. There’s even no longer an individual mandate. So I even spent a couple years without health insurance, which I do not recommend by the way. I was incredibly stupid. That was while I rode my motorcycle, no health insurance, very stupid.

[00:38:27] Steve Adcock: But for two years, luckily it worked fine for me, but I definitely did not do that. recommend that. A lot of health plans are available on the marketplace. For us, since we don’t have kids, a high deductible plan works for us. It’s obviously not going to work that way for everybody, especially if you have a larger family.

[00:38:43] Steve Adcock: But I think we pay 500 a month per person. So that’s 1000 a month. It’s still not cheap by any means, but it’s not like it was 10 years ago when you had to pay basically full price with no subsidies, nothing. And if you do qualify for subsidies, and the crazy part about subsidies is it’s based on income, not based on net worth.

[00:39:06] Steve Adcock: So you could have 10 million of net worth and no income and you qualify for lower health insurance because of those subsidies. So that’s one for a lot of early retirees, lots of them, that’s what they count on for their low income, making them qualified for health care subsidies, which drastically reduces the cost of their health care to something that’s actually affordable.

[00:39:33] Patrick Donley: Speaking of income, if you are living off your. Investments. What’s the number as a married, single person too, that you can sell off and have capital gains and not be taxed on? Isn’t there a certain amount that you can sell off X amount of dollars and you’re not going to be taxed on capital gains if your income is below a certain amount?

[00:39:52] Steve Adcock: I don’t know those numbers. That’s correct. Honestly, I don’t know those exact numbers either, but yes, if you do stay below a certain amount, I think it’s around, I want to say it’s around the 40k mark, but don’t quote me on that because I’m not sure. I think as a single person, it’s around 40. Yeah, I believe so.

[00:40:09] Steve Adcock: And obviously higher if you’re married, but yeah, if you can just stay under that, so you qualify for those subsidies, that makes a huge difference in your health care bill. No question about it. 

[00:40:19] Patrick Donley: I want to circle back to that book and start talking about some of these millionaire habits that, like you, recommend a young person develop now.

[00:40:26] Patrick Donley: Like I’ve got teenage kids that I want them to start. I’m like, the habits you form now are going to stay with you. So you better start thinking about forming good ones. It’s questionable whether they are right now, good ones. I’m on him a little bit, but what are some of those habits that you recommend people start developing early?

[00:40:43] Steve Adcock: My very first habit that I discuss in the book is millionaires say yes. There’s so many opportunities out there. Millionaires say yes. Millionaires go wide and then they go deep. And by that, they say yes to a lot of their opportunities, get involved, just getting exposure to new things, new ways of doing business, just switching companies often, which is what I did throughout, throughout my career.

[00:41:07] Steve Adcock: And then really going deep into those areas that work well, and then saying no to the areas that didn’t. Not every opportunity is going to work out. And that’s good. That’s fine. There’s no, no question about that, that some won’t work out, but many will. But the point is you’re not going to know what you’re good at.

[00:41:23] Steve Adcock: You’re not going to know what you like. You’re not going to know what you’re going to make a lot of money doing unless you just put yourself out there and get involved in everything that you possibly can. Meet as many people as you possibly can. Grow your network. And these opportunities are going to start flooding your way.

[00:41:41] Steve Adcock: You just have to put that first foot forward, which for a lot of people, myself included, quite frankly, is really difficult. I’m an introvert by nature. So for me, putting myself out there, it was tough, difficult at the beginning. Now it’s no big deal because I’ve done it a while and I know what I’m good at.

[00:41:57] Steve Adcock: And more importantly, I know what I suck at. 

[00:42:00] Patrick Donley: And it’s really unlikely that your first gig is going to be the thing that you’re going to do the rest of your life. I think that advice is to throw a bunch at the wall, see what sticks, see what you like, and then run with that. Then you can start to say no to the things that aren’t, you’re not talented at, or they don’t produce the income you want, or whatever.

[00:42:17] Patrick Donley: What are some other habits too that some of your favorite ones? 

[00:42:21] Steve Adcock: Millionaires ask for raises. They never rely on their business to just offer a raise, or they don’t just accept the cost of living raise every year. They always ask for what they’re worth. And to do that, you really need to keep your feelers out there about what’s available, the other job opportunities that you have, and what they’re paying.

[00:42:41] Steve Adcock: I always even switch companies every three to four years. And with every switch, I got about a 25 percent increase in salary, way more than my cost of living raises. And that’s part of negotiating a high salary is a part of the hiring process. So it’s very easy to keep your salary going up if you’re okay with moving around a little bit more often.

[00:43:04] Steve Adcock: Another habit is the pillars of investing. And if you’re in the U S. Those are typically your traditional. 401k, which is pre tax, which means it reduces your taxable income. Your Roth IRA, which grows tax free. So if you expect taxes to increase in the future, and here’s a hint, they will, then Roth IRAs are a great option to start investing in.

[00:43:28] Steve Adcock: Then you go to a taxable brokerage account. So after you funnel money into your long term investments, your 401k and Roth IRAs for your retirement. Then you open up a, for example, a Vanguard brokerage account and start funneling money into there. Again, highly recommend index funds and ETFs. If you’re not really sure where to go, give them a call, Fidelity, Schwab.

[00:43:51] Steve Adcock: All these companies have people that you could work with to help you determine what you should be investing in and just start. Make it automatic. Set up bank transfers every month. That’s another millionaire habit. So you don’t have to remember to fund your retirement accounts and your investments accounts and your savings.

[00:44:12] Steve Adcock: Always make it automatic without exception. You just set it up once And it just works. 

[00:44:19] Patrick Donley: Anything else that comes to mind in the habits? And I also wanted to hear what books may have influenced you as you were writing the book or provided some of the source material for the ideas. 

[00:44:29] Steve Adcock: The best book that I have ever read on personal finance and becoming a millionaire is called the millionaire next door by the late Dr.

[00:44:37] Steve Adcock: Thomas Stanley. That was so influential to me. And that book more or less proves that most millionaires are self made. They don’t necessarily live in houses on the hill and drive expensive cars. Those are high income earners, not necessarily rich people. There’s a very big difference between those two.

[00:44:57] Steve Adcock: Read that book. I cannot stress that enough. The numbers are going to be way weird because it was written decades ago. So the salary numbers and the cost of cars and all that’s going to be just radically different than it is today. But the concepts still apply. Millionaires don’t necessarily spend like millionaires and they typically don’t inherit.

[00:45:18] Steve Adcock: It was more true in the past that millionaires or a lot of rich people inherited their wealth, but that is becoming less And less of a reality today. And there are more studies than I can count that prove that the vast majority of millionaires are self made. They don’t just have luck with their money. And the reason why they’re self made is because they practice exactly what’s in Dr.

[00:45:42] Steve Adcock: Thomas Stanley’s book. They don’t. Spend money on frivolous crap that just makes them look rich. They save and invest their money. So they actually are rich. 

[00:45:53] Patrick Donley: Yeah. I love Morgan Housel’s book, the psychology of money. He’s got the whole idea of forgetting the Joneses. Like you don’t want to keep up with them.

[00:46:00] Patrick Donley: They’re drowning in debt. That’s another good one. 

[00:46:03] Steve Adcock: The Joneses are broke. Exactly. I absolutely love that whole concept. In fact, one of the most controversial things I think that I believe about is personal finance. A lot of people think that you need a mortgage on your home as long as it’s low interest for cash flow, for leverage.

[00:46:20] Steve Adcock: People like to throw around the term leverage. It’s always about leverage. And I do understand that there is truth to that. Like it’s better to own than to rent, better to own than to rent. But if you read the psychology of money and many other books, quite frankly, making the right decision, it’s not just about the math.

[00:46:39] Steve Adcock: It’s about what makes you sleep better at night. And if it makes you sleep better knowing that you don’t have a mortgage, I don’t care if you have a 2 percent mortgage, pay that sucker off. Your sleep’s important. Your happiness is important. Living a stress free life is important. So don’t make decisions based purely on math and ignore the emotional psychological component.

[00:47:04] Steve Adcock: Decisions because you’re gonna drive yourself crazy. You might have a little more money, but quite frankly, who cares if you’re stressed out? If you’re always worried about something or other, then what good is that money doing for you anyway? You’re just going, quite frankly, you’re probably going to die young.

[00:47:20] Steve Adcock: If you lead a high stress life because you think you’re gonna make more, there’s always two sides to every single money decision period. Always two sides. The math and the psychology. We always hear about math. We almost never hear about psychology. And that’s the thing I love about Morgan’s book.

[00:47:42] Steve Adcock: He discusses the thing that we never hear about, and that’s at least 50%. of the whole financial independence equation. It’s psychology. It’s the emotions that go behind that drive our decisions with our cash. 

[00:47:58] Patrick Donley: I’m glad you touched on the mortgage, the whole topic or idea of the mortgage, because I was going to ask you that his favorite chapter of the book is the last one where it’s called confessions.

[00:48:09] Patrick Donley: And the psychology of money where it’s just what’s under the hood? Here’s what I do with my own money and he just lays it out. And he has paid off his home and he said the psychology, the psychological comfort of that is massive knowing that for the rest of his life, he and his family are going to have a place to stay, whatever happens yeah, traditional financial advice would probably say you need to have a mortgage.

[00:48:30] Steve Adcock: Yeah. When we bought our house, we could have taken out a mortgage, but we didn’t. We just paid the whole thing off and we’ve, we haven’t had a mortgage in years. If you include our Airstream, probably closer to a decade, but yeah, we could have taken out a mortgage, but you either have more cash now, or you have more cash flow over the months, which is opportunity costs.

[00:48:48] Steve Adcock: You can do more with that cash as you get opportunities with that higher cash flow. The other side of that, of course, is. Yeah. You have more money to invest. Those investments build over time. You’re going to make way, way more money then or now. But then, I think the thing to understand, especially in the mortgage versus rent discussion, and if you ever read Ramit Sethi’s material or listen to him, he goes into some depth about renting versus mortgage.

[00:49:16] Steve Adcock: The mortgage is the least you will spend, the lowest amount of money you will spend on your house. every single month. The least, that is where it begins with fixes, improvements, whatever. It all goes up from there. Rent is the most you will pay every single month. That’s the most. That is the very top.

[00:49:36] Steve Adcock: You’re not responsible for anything. Within reason, of course, you’re not responsible for anything. So that concept or that way of thinking, I think it’s a little bit, it makes the decision a little bit less clear cut, I think, than a lot of people think it is, because there really are trade offs.

[00:49:53] Steve Adcock: Even if you are hell bent on having a mortgage, so you have extra money to invest, for a lot of people, it’s not going to be quite like that. 

[00:50:03] Patrick Donley: I want to hear once you’re done with the Airstream, you’re at the house. What’s an average day like? A lot of people say I get bored, like the boredom thing.

[00:50:11] Patrick Donley: And there’s a stat I think that you have actually about that early retirees die younger. Talk to me about that. Like, why is that? 

[00:50:19] Steve Adcock: Yeah, early retirement is associated with an early death. And it’s not because you quit your job. It’s because you quit your job with nothing else to do. That’s the second part of that statement.

[00:50:30] Steve Adcock: why you will die young. If you have no purpose, if you have no reason for getting up in the morning, that is going to kill you. Retiring early is not going to kill you. Having no purpose will kill you. And the purpose is going to look different for everybody, of course. But if early retirement is your thing, is your goal, if that’s what you want to do, I implore you not to pull the plug on your full time job until You have your next, your purpose after your job is to figure out exactly what you’re going to do.

[00:51:00] Steve Adcock: It doesn’t matter what it is, but you have to have something there. And for me, I really got involved in writing. I do a lot of writing online. I have a newsletter called Millionaire Habits. I always write about that. I’m very heavily engaged on social media, which I like. I like interacting with people and talking about this stuff.

[00:51:17] Steve Adcock: Every single day, I’m excited about that. I get jazzed about that. And that’s what gets me up every single day. We usually get up at about six, work out in our home gym here on our property about seven o’clock or so, have a post gym meal. I get involved in writing. I write a couple of articles, go out for a walk.

[00:51:35] Steve Adcock: I get 10 to 12, 000 steps a day. Then come back, maybe do a little bit more writing. Then we have happy hour at four, have dinner, and watch some TV. It probably does sound boring to a lot of people out there. If you constantly need stimulation, it’s always something going on. You have to go to concerts and whatever.

[00:51:51] Steve Adcock: And if that’s your thing, that’s fine. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But for us. Living a more simple life with less going on with less on our calendars. In fact, this podcast was the only thing that was on my calendar today. And that’s such a great thing to be able to wake up and say, I can do whatever I want.

[00:52:11] Steve Adcock: It doesn’t matter. I feel like going for a five mile hike. I’ll do it. If I feel like I’m writing for an extra hour, I’ll do it. It just doesn’t matter because you have full control. I think 

[00:52:27] Patrick Donley: It’s such a good point about there’s so many people I think that have devoted so much time and energy to their career.

[00:52:34] Patrick Donley: And then when that ends, they have no clue who they are, what they like to do. Maybe they’ve raised a family, but I think it’s like a real loss. It’s now what? 

[00:52:42] Steve Adcock: Yeah, if your job is your only hobby, you have no business retiring early. 

[00:52:47] Patrick Donley: Yeah. Steve, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate your time and sharing some of these ideas and the millionaire habits.

[00:52:53] Patrick Donley: It’s just good stuff. How can people find out about the book? Find out more about you, get in touch with you, things like that. 

[00:53:00] Steve Adcock: Find out about the book, you can go to millionaire habits. us, not com, us, that is my main website and the book is linked on the main page, just scroll down about half a page and you’ll see it there.

[00:53:12] Steve Adcock: I’m also online on Twitter at Steve On Speed. The On Speed part came about because I drove a Corvette and rode a motorcycle, it has nothing to do with drugs, I just like to go fast, so that was, that’s the significance of the On Speed part. Those are the two main areas where you can find me online. 

[00:53:29] Patrick Donley: Awesome. Is there anything that we didn’t touch on that you wanted to talk about here?

[00:53:34] Steve Adcock: The last thing I would say is, whenever I talk about the concept of FIRE, Financial Independence, and Retire Early, I want to make the point that these are two completely separate concepts. The financial independence part should be everybody’s goal. Every single person, everybody who’s listening to this podcast, without fail, every person, financial independence should be your goal.

[00:53:54] Steve Adcock: Period. No exceptions. Absolutely none. The early retirement part definitely won’t be for everybody. So if you love your job, continue working for the rest of your life. Who cares? If you enjoy what you’re doing, that’s all that matters. But the financial independence part gives you options. You might enjoy your job now, but you get a dick for a boss, and guess what?

[00:54:14] Steve Adcock: You might not like your job then, but if you are financially independent, guess what you can do? I’m out! See ya! And I’ll take three months, or six months, or even a couple years off to figure out what you want to do. So always separate those two things. The F. I. part and the R. E. part. The F. I. part is for you.

[00:54:29] Steve Adcock: I don’t care who you are. The RE part may not be, and that is perfectly okay. 

[00:54:35] Patrick Donley: Good place to stop here. Steve, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. 

[00:54:38] Steve Adcock: You got it. I appreciate the opportunity. 

[00:54:41] Patrick Donley: Okay, folks, that’s all I had for today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I’ll see you back here real soon.

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